- I think it's doing the Zen 'platform' a disservice. It's a bland theme and not a particularly exciting example of Zen's sub themeability.
- It surely must be an extra burden for the Zen maintainer.
- No real harm done if provided as a seperate download I think? Maaaaybe you can even find another maintainer for it.
- It's just an extra theme in my Drupal's theme list I would rather not have to remove everytime I update Zen.

I used it the other day, I needed a bland theme that was easy to modify. Maybe the dis-service could be counter acted by adding more "exciting" sub themes? Maybe Zen classic and other sub themes could be moved into their own spot? I dont really know how theme projects work, as I'm used to modules. Mostly I just wanted to say, I used it the other day.

@YesCT: Yes, the proposal is to remove it from the Zen download and make it a separate project, not to kill it, you'd still be able to download and use it.

I'd just like to see the Zen theme focus on being just the framework+starterkit.

Not many zen sub themes get contributed back at all and even if they do, it would not be useful to add them to the actual Zen download. It would mean a lot more work for the maintainer and the use case for any 'designed' sub theme would always be smaller than for the primary use case of the actual framework.

Sounds reasonable. Could the zen sub themes be put in the zen catagory, or easy to locate some how when browsing or searching for themes? Maybe ask for a community guideline when contributing a zen sub theme that the project description use the phrase "zen subtheme" and link to the main zen project/theme. I guess that might happen naturally. Maybe there could be a link from the zen project page to an issue in the queue, and people could add to that issue a link to new zen subthemes? Or would that be better in the docs somewhere?

Maybe this might encourage more subthemes being contributed back? But, that would require themers to learn to use the revision control system and maintains their own project...